In order to engage all students in your content material, good teachers make connections to the popular interests of their students. Making sense of a text doesn’t happen randomly or spontaneously. Good readers make connections to what they already know, their experiences in the world, and to other texts. We can call it developing Spidey powers or helping students access and develop their schemata. Good teachers help students make connections, and also get to know their students’ interests and the local and popular culture in which they are living and going to school. Using popular culture can also signal to your students that you care about knowing more about what they care about.
For this assignment, you will design an activity that could be used as part of a larger unit that connects popular culture to either a topic from class or a topic in your content area. Turn in (upload to dropbox) your lesson plan for this presentation. For the presentation component of this assignment,Present an overview of the lesson and demonstrate the part that makes use of popular culture. How you construct your demonstration is up to you. In addition to the demonstration itself, provide us with some background on why you selected the text or texts you did and how you think the activity will fit into a larger unit of instruction. You may also spend some time reflecting on what you learned from preparing the activity and what, if anything, you might change or research more in-depth. The total time of the presentation should be 10 minutes.
Searching for a examples? Click here for some ideas arranged by content area. If you stumble across others, please add them to the list!
For this assignment, you will design an activity that could be used as part of a larger unit that connects popular culture to either a topic from class or a topic in your content area. Turn in (upload to dropbox) your lesson plan for this presentation. For the presentation component of this assignment,Present an overview of the lesson and demonstrate the part that makes use of popular culture. How you construct your demonstration is up to you. In addition to the demonstration itself, provide us with some background on why you selected the text or texts you did and how you think the activity will fit into a larger unit of instruction. You may also spend some time reflecting on what you learned from preparing the activity and what, if anything, you might change or research more in-depth. The total time of the presentation should be 10 minutes.
Searching for a examples? Click here for some ideas arranged by content area. If you stumble across others, please add them to the list!